RSCM Report 2011: Part Two

Thursday, July 29

An imaginary Sermon, for Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of St. Cecilia: the feast of Bach, Handel, and Purcell

II Chronicles 7:1-6 (I would suggest 5:11-14 as a superior alternative)

Psalm 150 (at the Eucharist this day we sang Psalm 17 instead, since that is what we were learning for Sunday. But Psalm 150 is certainly appropriate)

Colossians 2:2-6 (this has no connection whatsoever with the feast. Might it be a misprint in the publication "Holy Men, Holy Women" for Colossians 3:12-16? That passage would be a good choice – “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.”)

Luke 2:8-14 (“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night...” As the preacher for our Eucharist noted in his [real, not imaginary] sermon, Handel set these verses memorably in “Messiah.” I would add that Bach's treatment of this passage in the Christmas Oratorio is equally notable.)

Collect of the Day:
Almighty God, beautiful in majesty and majestic in holiness, who dost teach us in Holy Scripture to sing thy praises and who gavest thy musicians Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel and Henry Purcell grace to show forth thy glory in their music: Be with all those who write or make music for thy people, that we on earth may glimpse thy beauty and know the inexhaustible riches of thy new creation in Jesus Christ our Savior; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.



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On the twenty-eighth of July 1750, J. S. Bach departed this life, busy with his work to the end. In his final days, he completed the organ chorale Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich, “Before Thy throne I stand,” dictating the last page of it to his son-in-law, his hands too weak to hold the ink pen. It is a fair statement of his frame of mind as he approached death, having poured out his sixty-five years of life in music for the glory of God. Jesu, juva, “Jesus, help!” he wrote at the head of most of his manuscripts, and Soli Deo gloria, “To God alone be glory,” at the end.

[here, play the Chorale]

Before thy throne, my God, I stand,
Myself, my all, are in thy hand.
O show me thine approving face,
Nor from thy child withhold thy grace.

In the Episcopal sanctoral calendar, Bach is joined today with Handel and Purcell. Much could be said about Handel, the composer of "Messiah" and "Israel in Egypt," and about Purcell, the young organist, dead before the age of forty and buried next to his instrument in Westminster Abbey among poets and kings, perhaps the finest composer Great Britain has produced since Thomas Tallis. Purcell’s tune Westminster Abbey, drawn from one of his Anthems, was sung last fall when Pope and Archbishop visited the Abbey for Choral Evensong:

[here, play a stanza of the hymn: number 518 in the Hymnal 1982 -- “Christ is made the sure foundation”]

Many of us in this room are Protestant or Anglican, like Bach, Handel, and Purcell. Many are Roman Catholic, alongside Tomás Luis da Victoria, composer of our Anthem this morning:

Gaudent in coelis animae sanctorum,
qui Christi vestigia sunt secuti:
et quia pro ejus amore sanguinem suum fuderunt,
ideo cum Christo exsultant sine fine.

The souls of the saints rejoice in heaven,
whom Christ's footsteps have followed:
and, because for love of him they shed their blood,
therefore with Christ they will rejoice without end.
[Link to a performance of this motet]

Today is not just about Bach, Handel and Purcell. It is about Victoria, who spent his life in church music. He was a choirboy, adult chorister, organist, priest, and spent most of his adult life as chaplain and choirmaster for a convent, busily writing motets, Mass settings, and other choral music, like what we will sing in a few minutes. He is generally considered the greatest Spanish composer, and all of his work -- indeed, all of his life -- was about singing to God. It is four hundred years ago this month that he died: August 20, 1611.

Today is about dozens of other composers of faith, from those of our own time back through Messiaen, Franck, Bruckner, and Mendelssohn (whose work we are singing this week), and on through Joseph Haydn, who began each day’s compositional work on his knees in prayer, and Antonio Vivaldi, the “Red Priest” who, for the benefit of the girls in the orphanage where he served, wrote music for stringed instruments that continues to soar into the heavens. Further still we could go, through Heinrich Schütz and the masters of the Renaissance and Middle Ages, and the anonymous composers who crafted the repertoire of Gregorian Chant in the early generations of the Church.

And it is about composers whose faith is known to God alone, people who, on the surface, seemed agnostic or at the least uninterested in religion, but in their music showed their true colors. Who can hear or sing the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, or Ave Verum Corpus of Mozart, or the anthem “Lord, thou hast been our refuge” by Vaughan Williams, and doubt their faith?

We are here this week: Roman Catholic, Methodist, Episcopalian, perhaps other faith traditions. I know that many of you are people of deep faith, thoroughly involved in your congregations at home. I suspect that others of you would tell me that you do not believe; you are here for the music and your friends. But this week, we sing, and that transcends all divisions. Latin, English, Xhosa, German -- all are languages of Music, as indeed is every language ever spoken on this planet. Young and old, Anglo, Latino, African-American, Chinese-American, Protestant, Catholic, believers, unbelievers. We are all here.

It is often hard to see the unity of the Body of Christ. Our culture thrives on division, pitting one group against another. Too often, our churches do the same. Some of us will take communion this morning, some will not. This is wrong, but there is nothing that any of us in this room can do about it.

When we sing, none of that matters. The Song transcends every boundary.

That brings us back to Bach. When he was a boy of ten, he used to sneak into his uncle's study at night. His uncle, an organist, kept his music locked up because he thought it was too valuable for children to mess around with it. But Bach figured out that he could slip his arm through the latticework of the cabinet door. He would take out a manuscript, spend most of the night copying it by candlelight, and carefully slip the original back into the cabinet before morning. He worked with similar diligence at his music-making throughout his life. Much of it was spent in daily choral rehearsals at the Thomasschule in a manner that we would find much like an RSCM course.

The Song does not come without cost; to do it well, it requires all that you are, every part of your being. One of my teachers, Helen Kemp, used to sing:

[here sing, and have the congregation echo:]

Body, Mind, Spirit, Voice:
It takes the whole person to sing and rejoice.

It is, in short, a little “martyrdom.” We give ourselves over to the Song, without regard for where it will lead us. We practice, we rehearse while others are outside playing, or watching a movie, or hanging out with their friends. It is the musician’s way to fulfill the words of St. Paul: “I die daily” (I Corinthians 15:31). It puts us on the path of the saints described in our anthem, who “with Christ, rejoice without end” – cum Christo exsultant sine fine. It leads us to the same end as theirs, the end that Bach foresaw on his deathbed, and the end foreseen in the final pages of Handel’s masterwork. In his text from the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the four “beasts” (KJV) or “living creatures” (NRSV) have the last word, representing the participation of every living thing that God has made in the eternal Song. In a masterful stroke, Handel depicts the four beasts in a four-voiced fugue:

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.

Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.

Amen